Technological change (i.e. innovation) continues and will transform IP law/practice. Here is a new one, a book scanner ("ripper") for the individual, the next step up from Amazon's Kindle, a hand-held reader of already digitized books link here.

The first review of the Atiz BookSnap aptly describes it as clunky -- "an ominous three-foot-high construction draped with a thick black darkroom-style shade -- looks like a Goth puppet theater and weighs 44 pounds. Under the shade is an angled cradle for a book and a glass platen to hold the pages down during scanning. You turn the pages yourself. It costs $1,600, not including the two Canon digital cameras (around $500 each) necessary to capture the page images and send them to your computer, where software transforms the pictures into files that can be read on a screen or an e-book reader. It takes considerable fiddling to get images set up properly."

But someone is bound to improve it. And so what Google has been doing, digitizing the world's libraries, will become mainstream, creating competitive pressures on book publishers that will both greatly lower the price of books and put the industry on the defensive.

Harvard's faculty has voted overwhelmingly to put it research on line link here. "Robert Darnton, the director of the University Library, wrote in an e-mail message, 'I hope this marks a turning point in the way communications operate in the world of scholarship.'" The library's site is expected to be up and running on April 1. It joins a free online legal research site (www.plol.org).

Free public access shows real progress.

Congress doesn't usually intervene in individual patent cases, but here it has taken the first steps to do so link here. Thereby, big banks would get immunity against a patent lawsuit potentially worth billions in costs to them. The object of their attentions is a Texas patent troll, Data Treasury, which is demanding damages "for infringing on its method of digitally scanning, sending, and archiving checks."

There are several issues here. One is whether the patent is valid as the Patent Office has found--it isn't, if the invention is obvious, as seems likely to this reader. Another is, assuming that the patent is valid and that patents have any real value in promoting innovation, whether the inventor hasn't been cheated. But now, in addition to lawyering up, the troll has had to lobby up. Guess who pays.

The Feb. 25 issue of Forbes magazine has an interesting article on the causes and consequences of occupational licensure, "The New Unions".

Licensing laws injure the poor more than anyone (as if you didn't know). In at least one state, you have to be licensed to be a shampoo assistant.

Money fact: estimated annual cost to the U.S. economy: $100 billion.

Depressing fact: occupational licensing is growing.

Next up: tougher state- (and federally-?) mandated requirements for mortgage brokers.

An interior design professor-cum-rent seeker's campaign for monopolistic restrictions in that industry highlights the political process behind licensing. Don't dare call yourself an interior designer if you're merely an interior decorator.

Adam Smith, call your office.

Picking up on the trend to online publication, publisher Harper Collins is using this device to promote books by putting six (including the Paulo Coelho novel David wrote about link here) each month at its website link here. Fantasy novelist Neil Gaiman has riffed on the idea by selecting his online novel for posting online, based on the votes of readers of his blog from a list of eight at his website . The books will not be downloadable or printable.

Want cheap advertising? make it a contest.

The Harvard faculty will vote today on whether to publish scholarly and scientific research on the web rather than in expensive journals link here.

"In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn," said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. "It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository."

There is more to the proposal, so read the article and arguments against as well as for. But hopefully, the proposal will be adopted by other faculties as well.

The Washington Post recently editorialized on the high cost to students of the textbooks they are often required to buy link here. That prompted me to write the editor a letter pointing out the virtues of free online availability to lower student costs link here. It also avoids the moral dilemma faced by faculty members in pursuing their share of the monopoly profits, as well as the high cost of revising printed publications when the subject matter changes rapidly.

We get too few opportunities like this to spread the word.

The anonymous Patent Troll Tracker posts his latest compilation of Litigation Statistics for January 2008 link here. "At long last, here are my January 2008 patent litigation statistics. In total, PACER/ECF showed 230 patent cases filed in January 2008, compared to 210 in January 2007. This is a 10% year-to-year increase." See the rest of the post for lots of details on who, what, and where.

So the broken system is still with us and still shows no signs of improvement.

Writing in today's New York Times, Joe Nocera picks up an old story about Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling suing RDR Books for copyright infringement because it was about to publish Steven Vander Ark's Harry Potter Lexicon link here. The publisher is getting an assist from Anthony Falzone of the Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project, which was founded by Larry Lessig, allowing Nocera to do a riff on the growth of criticism of copyright litigation.

It is a cheering thought that some of the criticism of intellectual property abuse is finally making it to the main stream media. We will need a lot more of that if we are to get the laws amended in a reasonable way, promoting innovation rather than stifling it.

A federal appeals court upheld a lower court's 2006 ruling that a corporate consultant, who thought up American Express's "My Life, My Card" slogan, has no trademark rights in it. His claim is akin to an ad agency's marketing concept. Ad agencies get paid for their marketing and advertising work. So can this guy.

Here is the story.